November 2007 Archives

It gives me great pleasure to announce that, last month, Chris Dolan successfully completed his grant to write 20 Perl-Best-Practices-inspired policies for Perl::Critic. There are several reasons why this wasn't posted sooner, but I apologise for the delay.

Chris delivered 19 out of the 20 policies originally proposed, as one of the policies was implemented by another contributor prior to the start of the grant. During the course of this work, he squished some bugs in PPI, which Adam Kennedy acknowledged his use.perl blog as being instrumental to the release of version 1.200.

Chris was also interviewed for PerlBuzz he explained how he got involved with the project, why people should use Perl::Critic and what he plans to do next. Furthermore, Chris was a speaker at the WebGUI Users Conference in Madison, WI, presenting Perl::Critic's features and demonstrating how to start using it (slides available here).

I'd like to thank Chris for being such a joy to work with, for his commitment to pragmatic excellence and for the great work he has done for the community by developing and promoting Perl::Critic as a tool to encourage consistency and quality. On behalf of The Perl Foundation, I wish him every success in his future projects!

It is with great pleasure that The Perl Foundation and Mozilla Foundation announce a major new Perl 6Development Grant. The recipient of the grant is Patrick Michaud, the Perl 6 compiler pumpking and lead programmer of a Perl 6 implementation based on Parrot and on his own work on the Perl 6 compiler and grammar. The grant will provide Patrick with four months of support for this work beginning November 1, 2007. Patrick will receive US$15,000 over this time, with $10,000 of the funding coming from Mozilla Foundation and $5,000 from The Perl Foundation.

The goals for this development grant are:

To have a Perl 6 on Parrot implementation that supports commonly-used Perl 6 constructs;

Improvements to the Perl 6 test suite;

To substantially complete the Parrot Compiler Toolkit, including documentation;

Increased community participation in Perl 6 and Parrot development, including development efforts on other languages utilizing Parrot and the Parrot Compiler Toolkit.

In order to ensure the proper management and progress for this grant TPF asked Jesse Vincent to be the Grant Manager. Jesse has graciously accepted this volunteer position. Jesse is a noted Perl community member and he has worked as the Perl 6 project manager for the past several years. Additionally, he (through his company, Best Practical Solutions) has supported the Perl 6 effort through a series of microgrants.

The Parrot team has continued to make monthly releases, releasing 0.4.16 in September and 0.4.17 in October. These releases include more work on the NQP (Not Quite Perl) language as well as many updates and cleanups for the design documents (PDDs).

As usual, there were also plenty of bug fixes, and in particular much of the code was reviewed as part of the effort to complete the PMC (Parrot Magic Cookie) design.

I'm very happy to report that the Parrot team has met the milestones in the new, much more aggressive schedule laid out by Allison, and is on track to meet the coming November 1st milestones as well.